APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Monthly Archives: August 2020
Six Colours
Apple has, in my opinion, some of the best general-purpose computing technology on the market right now, and has had some of the best for all of this millennium. However, their business practices are increasingly punitive, designed to extract greater … Continue reading
Posted in AAPL
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Nvidia’s ambitions are scarcely hidden. Once it owns Arm it will withdraw its licensing agreements from its competitors, notably Intel and Huawei, and after July next year take the rump of Arm to Silicon Valley This tech giant up for … Continue reading
There are two different questions of fairness when it comes to the App Store rules. Apple always spin it to mean “these rules are applied fairly”, which is certainly not true. Putting aside questions of why Netflix get to do … Continue reading
grotag
Lots of Amiga documentation was in the AmigaGuide format. These are simple ASCII documents with some rudimentary markup to turn them into hypertext, working something like TeXInfo manuals. Think more like a markdown-enabled Gopher than the web though: you can … Continue reading
Posted in Amiga, Java
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Concrete freedoms
Discussions about free software or open source software can always seem a bit abstract. Who cares if I’ve got the source code, if I’m never going to read it or change it? Why would I want “free” versions of my … Continue reading
Posted in freesoftware
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NeXT marketed their workstations by letting Sun convince people they wanted a workstation, then trying to convince customers (who were already impressed by Sun) that their workstation was better. As part of this, they showed how much better the development … Continue reading
Getting started on my Vampire V4
Apollo accelerators make the Vampire, the fastest Motorola 680×0-compatible accelerators for Amiga around. Actually, they claim that with the Sheepsaver emulator to trap ROM calls, it’s the fastest m68k-compatible Mac around too. The Vampire Standalone V4 is basically that accelerator, … Continue reading
Posted in Amiga
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On the topic of the Apple II, remember that MOS was owned by Commodore Business Machines, a competitor of Apple’s, throughout the lifetime of the computer. Something to bear in mind while waiting to see where ARM Holdings lands.
An eight-year-old model of iPad is now considered vintage and obsolete. For comparison, the Apple ][ was made from 1977-1993 (16 years) and the January 1983 Apple //e would’ve had exactly the same software support as the final model sold … Continue reading
